Rommetveit Kjetil, Wynne Brian
University of Bergen, Norway.
Lancaster University, UK.
Public Underst Sci. 2017 Feb;26(2):133-147. doi: 10.1177/0963662516663057.
This essay begins from the intensified entanglements of technoscientific innovation with miscellaneous societal and public fields of interest and action over recent years. This has been accompanied by an apparent decline in the work of purification of discourses of natural and human agency, which Latour observed in 1993. Replacing such previous discursive purifications, we increasingly find technoscientific visions of the imagined-possible as key providers of public meanings and policies. This poses the question of what forms of legitimation are constituted by these sciences, including the ways in which they enter into articulations of public matters. Revisiting historical and contemporary theories of imagination and science, this essay proposes a joint focus on imagination, publics and technoscience and their mutual co-production over time. This focus is then directed towards recent reconfigurations of technosciences with their imagined publics and towards how public issues may become constituted by social actors as active imaginations-exercising agents.
本文始于近年来技术科学创新与社会及公共利益和行动的各个领域之间日益紧密的纠葛。这一现象伴随着拉图尔在1993年所观察到的自然与人类能动性话语纯化工作的明显衰退。取代此前的这种话语纯化，我们越来越多地发现，对想象中可能之事的技术科学愿景成为了公共意义和政策的关键提供者。这就提出了一个问题，即这些科学构成了何种合法化形式，包括它们进入公共事务阐述的方式。通过回顾想象与科学的历史及当代理论，本文提议共同关注想象、公众和技术科学以及它们随时间的相互共同生产。这种关注随后指向技术科学与其想象中的公众的近期重构，以及公共问题如何可能被社会行为者建构为积极发挥想象力的主体。
